( Sorry - somehow this originally ended up in Crystal Reports)

Here's one that should get you going, esp. the boffins.

We hear a lot about global warming, the melting of polar ice caps and the resulting rise in sea level. What prompted me to write this is that there was another program on telly last night bleating on about this. London, for instance will be inundated and the British Isles will look a lot thinner and more "fijordy". There are those that aver that sea levels are already rising, as witnessed at some Pacific atolls, etc. I, personally, don't subscribe to that because, as is well known, the Earth can rise, fall and tilt, esp. at techtonic plate boundaries such as volcanic island chains. So we have no yard stick on which to neasure this, other than the land, which may be sinking.

Global warming and rising sea levels are very fashionable band-wagons to be on at the moment. Those not willing to get on, or opposing the view, tend to lose out on funding. Those who stick their necks out and openly oppose the view could be committing career suicide. Remember the bleating about the coming of the next ice-age back in the 70's? OK I appreciate that an increase in sea temp., around the Berring Straights etc., can cause more icebergs to melt and the Gulf Stream could shut down, pushing northern Europe into a big freeze, but that wasn't what was referred to in the 70's. And the USA needn't worry about this so much.

My question is an academic exercise, based on a hypothesis by one of those brave men willing to stick their necks out:

Given that water expands when it freezes, and that the majority of an iceberg is below the surface, wouldn't it therefore follow that the melting of the iceberg would result in its constituent water taking up less volume? Therefore, wouldn't the sea levels actually fall?

The factors to consider are:

1. What proportion of an iceberg is below the surface? Figures differ on this but I seem to recall that it's generally 5/6ths?
2. What is the ratio of the volumne of ice to that of very cold water?
3. The portion of the berg above the water is not displacing any sea water so that needs to be takem into consideration too when IT melts.
4. for the purposes of this exercise we need to discount the ice locked up ON LAND (such as in Greenland's glaciers), that might slip into the sea (how much of the polar ice-cap is effectively one big iceberg anyway)

I suppose the exercise can be approached simply by considering, say, 1 cc of ice floating in 1 cubic litre of water? Are there any other factors not considered above?

Go figure :-)

Terry

PS I wanted to put this in Chatter-chatter but I could only find Visual Foxpro-chatter